Excuse Me, But Did You Test This?

Our comments on Cuil.

That’s the most positive comment I can muster about Cuil.

Here’s a few others:

It’s not entirely useless.

Occasionally, it comes up with what you want.

It looks a little prettier than Google.

Enough with the putrid positivity. You’ll take my Google when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers. That’s what I think about Cuil.

Cuil is pretty bad. Here’s some proof:

I tossed in some keywords related to some very and fairly recent news events.

First, I tried “Robert Novak brain tumor”. It brought up absolutely nothing relevant about Mr. Novak’s diagnosis, though it often added a picture of Mr. Novak along with whatever it came up with, even when the picture wasn’t part of the webpage.

OK, that was yesterday’s news, might be unfair to expect a very recent websweep from Cuil.

So I tried “Obama Berlin.” It told me a lot about what Berlin, New Hampshire and only Berlin, New Hampshire, thought about him.

Let’s try again, “Obama West Wall prayer.” Not a clue.

Let’s try a fairly recent item in the technical arena “AMD market share first quarter 2008”. Nada again.

We could continue in this vein for quite some time, but let me show one it did find. I typed in “Stroligo do or die”. The do or die part was the name of an article I had written at the beginning of 2007.

It did find the article, though hardly on top, but let me show you what else it found:

Help! Gangstas have taken over my website!

Needless to say, Google had no problems with any of my queries.

I’m afraid Cuil reinvented the wheel and made it square.

Ed